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Ad featuring Olympian shot at Quail Ridge Dairy

Milk ad campaign features Katie Uhlaender

By Jenni Grubbs

Fort Morgan Times

Posted:
02/11/2018 05:03:38 PM MST

Katie Uhlaender, a skeleton racer for Team USA, visits with Quail Ridge Dairy owner Mary Kraft, right, during a tour the Fort Morgan dairy in November 2017. They were shooting a video for MilkPEP to promote the benefits of drinking milk for Olympic athletes, like Uhlaender. (MilkPEP / Courtesy photo)

Mary Kraft, left, tells Olympic skeleton racer Katie Uhlaender about the small hotels that young calves live in at Quail Ridge Dairy until they are old enough to be in larger pens or pastures. Kraft was giving Uhlaender a tour of the dairy while they also were shooting a commercial promoting milk in November 2017. (MilkPEP / Courtesy photo)

Fort Morgan's Quail Ridge Dairy has a connection to the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea.

Skeleton racer Katie Uhlaender of Team USA visited the dairy last fall and now is featured in advertisements promoting the benefits of drinking milk.

Mary Kraft, co-owner of Quail Ridge Dairy, said she had been surprised to get the call last September asking her dairy to be involved in the "My Focus" ad campaign.

"We were pretty excited when they called and asked us if they could do it with us," she said. "We'd never played with Olympics people before."

This campaign was being put together by MilkPEP, which is one of the organizations that puts together educational advertising on behalf of milk producers.

Katie Uhlaender, a skeleton racer for Team USA, visits with Quail Ridge Dairy owner Mary Kraft, right, during a tour the Fort Morgan dairy in November 2017. They are being filmed by a crew from MilkPEP for a video promoting the benefits of drinking milk for Olympic athletes like Uhlaender. (MilkPEP / Courtesy photo)

"They were looking for a dairy that's well managed because the athletes are well managed," Kraft said.

Such athletes depend on milk for the nutrition to drive them in their training and competition, she said.

Also, Kraft is an athlete herself, riding horses and competing in dressage.

Those were some of the criteria MilkPEP and Team USA used for picking out the locations for shooting such commercials for this campaign.

Another bonus was that they had a female Olympic athlete in mind, and Quail Ridge Dairy had a female running it.

Kraft was quick to give her husband, Chris Kraft, credit for being involved with running the dairy, too.

"Chris and I are exceptionally involved together in making things work," she said.

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Quail Ridge Dairy was also chosen as the location because so many Olympic athletes from Colorado were expected to go to South Korea to compete.

"Colorado has the most Olympic athletes going," Mary Kraft said.

When Uhlaender travelled from Colorado Springs, where she trains, to the Fort Morgan dairy for the shoot, Mary Kraft encountered an athlete who was also excited about the science going on at the dairy.

That makes sense in light of Uhlaender having studied animal science and behavioral science at Colorado Mountain College.

But she also wanted to learn more about the process of producing milk and how dairies like Quail Ridge ensure it will be of high quality and be good for fueling athletes, Mary Kraft said.

"She was so enthusiastic and got more enthusiastic as the day went on," the dairy owner recalled.

As they roamed the dairy, moving from spot to spot set up for shooting the video, Mary Kraft and Uhlaender spoke about how the science used for raising dairy cows meshed with the science of training athletes, since there were science-based concepts used for everything going on at the dairy.

Of course, they also spoke about what Uhlaender gets from drinking milk and how that helps her with her training.

"I feel like I go sledding for a living, so I don't know if I really work," she said. "But I definitely put a lot of work into prepping for that. Part of that is my nutrition."

Because of its vitamins and protein, Uhlaender called milk a "nutrient powerhouse.

"Protein is huge for maintaining muscle mass and recovering from all of my workouts," she said. "I train every day for Team USA, and so it is filling me with joy and pride to see all of this hard work and how much goes into feeding those cattle to produce what helps me become a great athlete."

"We feel like it's a whole team effort," Mary Kraft replied to Uhlaender. "Our job is to make everything well-fueled."

The video also shows Uhlaender even getting to attach the milking machine to a cow's udders.

Thinking back to the day of shooting brought a happy note to Mary Kraft's voice.

"We shot the whole thing in one day," Mary Kraft said. "It was a pretty short day because Katie was training. We filmed between one and six in one afternoon. It was pretty grueling. They had shots lined up, but part of it was pretty fun - just a rolling conversation."

Mary Kraft said she spoke with Uhlaender about how cows needed exercise, the right nutrition and enough sleep, just like Olympic athletes.

"It was interesting," Mary Kraft said. "Cows spend some time doing their job and then recovering, matching up closely to what Katie was doing."

The day of shooting felt "kind of like a reality TV show," Mary Kraft said. "We just fed on each other's energy, talking about things we love. Anytime you can find someone you mesh that well with, it's a lovely day."

Mary Kraft said she planned to follow closely how Uhlaender does at the 2018 Olympic Games.

The women's skeleton event is set to begin the middle of this week, with training heats scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday and then competition heats set for Friday and Saturday.

"The interesting thing is with Katie, there was some controversy in the last Olympics," Mary Kraft said, with the skeleton racer coming in fourth place and missing out on a bronze medal by only .04 seconds.

And thanks to a doping scandal that involved the 2014 Russian medal winner, for almost four years Uhlaender thought she then had gotten the bronze, even mentioning it in the video. But in early February, the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned Olympic bans for the Russian athletes, which could mean reinstating the bronze medal to Uhlaender's competitor. It could be years before that issue is finally settled.

But that could be strong motivation for the American skeleton racer in the 2018 Olympic Games, since she only would have needed a little bit more at the 2014 Olympic Games to have the medal be hers outright.

"A little more is always doable," Mary Kraft said.

The Fort Morgan dairy owner also was excited to be able to showcase both her dairy and the importance of milk through the video and ads, which she and the dairy volunteered to do, not as a money-making endeavor.

"For everything we do, we're interested in how the community moves forward," she said. "If I could turn it into a revenue stream, I sure would, but I think the revenue stream is people drinking milk."

And she is excited for people to watch the video or see the ads.

"There should be quite a number of things showing cows and how important milk is to fuel (the athletes') bodies," she said.

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